Paperclips
by SaturnXK
Summary: "I'm a pathological liar," Jack says, and there is a slight lilt in the creases of his voice. "I can't seem to tell the truth about anything." (Elsa is an accountant, while Jack counts down his years. Their relationship is a very dysfunctional one.) – Jack/Elsa. modern!au. twoshot.


image from tumblr (sorry, can't find the actual blogger).

**alternatively known as: **the story in which jack is a dumb street fighter who likes to leave elsa by herself for fifty billion years.

**inspired by****:** shinigami eyes from _death note_, the guy from nickelback's m/v _savin me_.

**notes:** so ty to the winter court on fb, especially to love-prn, jinski and arialene for adding in their two cents, and consequently helping me move this story along.

**warning:** unnecessary metaphors and depressed jack. its got a supernatural element to it, if you look at it properly. **t **for language ('fuck' is used sparingly).**  
**

**word count:** approx. 5700

so yeah this went over about eight rewrites and you won't believe the things that have changed as i tried to make this fic work.

* * *

**paperclips (1/2)**

part one: peter pan

* * *

When Elsa arrives home, Wednesday evening exhaustion and a handbag full of worries restless on her shoulder, she spots a pair of ruffled sneakers at her doorway, and her gaze slides over to her living room. He's here again, jacket tossed onto an armchair and dripping onto the floor, backpack vomiting its contents in the middle of her hallway. She pulls off her heels and watches the sleeping figure on her couch, snoring gently as the television croons romance and kisses over a table of wine and caviar. Her clock has been taken off its place on her wall, batteries pulled out and lying face down.

Elsa sighs quietly, and it's loud in the stillness of her apartment.

Logically, Elsa would wake him up and kick him out, and then go to make her dinner and spend the rest of the night finishing off the paperwork that desperately needs finishing. But she finds her legs taking her to him, white hair poking out of the tattered blanket, soft like feathers. And as she settles next to him, it feels so right that it's wrong, being by his side.

"Jack," she murmurs. The blankets stir. Two eyes blink open blearily, and in the dim lights, the blue of his eyes dull into a flat, primary colour.

"Hey, Elsa," Jack says, voice cracked and edged with sleep. "You're back."

"You're not supposed to be here," Elsa says, getting to her feet and brushing down her pencil skirt.

Jack hums as he gets up, and Elsa can't help but glance at his face, drinking in every detail. A high nose, thin lips, strong jaw, skin that's crisscrossed with tiny scars and scrapes and bumps and blemishes. He towers over her when he stands, slender fingers tousling his hair.

"I was hungry, though," Jack says petulantly. Elsa wants to hit him, because he sounds like a five year old. "And I needed your first aid kit," he adds sheepishly.

Clucking her tongue, Elsa begins picking up the Band-Aids and plasters that Jack has scattered on her coffee table, and she says, "Are you okay now?"

"Yup," Jack says, grinning slightly. "I'm always okay."

He heads over to the kitchen and rummages in her fridge. Elsa presses her lips together and tucks the first aid kit back into its place in her cupboards.

She makes a pot of noodles tonight, sprinkling in copious amounts of chili powder, ignoring Jack's whines. He steals half the food, eating straight out of the pot, and Elsa says nothing, only stares at him as he eats as if he hasn't eaten for days.

"So," Elsa says. "Why are you back? How much time do you have left now?"

"I have heaps of time," Jack says airily, waving his fork around. Soup specks her table. "Like thirty-five years? I just wanted to see you; is that so bad?"

"You only to come to see me after you've ticked down to the last minute on your damned clock," Elsa says dryly. "I don't appreciate being a life-giving genie, thank you very much."

Jack just beams at her again, canines bared and crinkles around his eyes. "But I know you'll always be there for me."

Her cutlery clinks against her bowl; his chair squeaks slightly as he turns.

"Are you going out again tonight?" Elsa asks, because the silence is suddenly so crushing and the words come out quicker than usual to fill in the gaps.

Jack doesn't answer, but Elsa already knows what he's going to say.

"I hate it when you do this," Elsa mutters, picking at the last strings of her ramen. "I don't understand why you do."

"Well," Jack says, and he is all false cheer and plastic smiles, "I've already been in two fights today and I didn't get as much money as I hoped. Third one's the charm, right?"

Elsa just picks up her bowl and goes to the sink. As she rinses it out, the oil slicks onto her fingers, and she hears the soft opening and closing of her apartment door. When she looks back over her shoulder, all that's left behind is an empty pot and the lingering scent of apples.

* * *

Elsa thinks that sometimes she's just too fucking nostalgic for her own good. There's no respectable reason why she allows Jack to come back to her, time and time again, when he just breaks her heart every time he leaves. And he will leave. He always leaves, and that's something Elsa has always associated with him.

They met sometime during highschool, two years away from graduating and weighed down by assignments and textbooks and exams around the corner. Jack had been in her maths class, and she remembers a boy sleeping through nearly every lesson, head tucked snugly into arms and faint shadows under his eyes.

She had never considered being his friend until the day a new teacher had taken over, because the old one had fallen pregnant. The new teacher, on her first lesson, had told everyone to tell her an interesting fact about themselves, along with a name.

Elsa can't remember what she said, but she remembers what Jack said.

"I'm Jack," the boy mumbled, yawning widely and exhaling noisily. "I hate clocks."

The class had laughed, snickers flitting through pink glossed mouths and lying teeth. Jack, when awake, had been somewhat of a class clown. He had an aura of playful irresponsibility, a smoker in the boys' toilets and almost always found with his lips at a girl's jaw and hands shoved up her skirt.

And yet, when Elsa accidently bumped into him in the school corridors later that day, she had still asked him, "Why do you hate clocks?"

She hadn't even recognised the words skipping from her mouth, and she'd expected that he wouldn't answer. They weren't friends, only knew of each other vaguely from the three shared classes they had.

"Dunno," Jack shrugged, and Elsa spotted a packet of cigarettes sticking out from his back pocket. "I know when I'm going to die, if that helps with your perception of anything."

"Oh. How do you know that?"

"There's a timer hanging above my head like a fucking crown, and it's ticking down the time I have left, right down to the very last second."

In the empty corridor, echoes of French and geography and history winding between their bodies, Elsa blinked and saw the way the light fell just short of his eyes, how his smirks were never really quite a smile, how shadows slipped into the cracks of his spine, and she knew.

So Elsa said, "You're not joking, are you?"

And Jack said, "No, I'm really not."

That day, at nine-thirty on a Tuesday morning, started something that was neither a friendship nor a romance, but something in between, like acceptance and relief and perhaps just a little wisp of a feeling that reminded Elsa a bit of home.

* * *

Years later, at twenty-five, Elsa is cleaning up Jack's messes as diligently as she did when she was seventeen.

"But this is honestly getting ridiculous," Elsa hisses, daubing his cut with antiseptic. Jack makes no sound, though she knows that it's stinging. "I told you–you can't just keep coming back here. This isn't a charity home. I have a job and work to do, and you have to stop trying to _kill _yourself, Jack."

Jack is stretched out on the cold floor, bare-chested and lying on his back. His stomach is an ugly painting of blue and purple bruises, and there's a nasty scratch cutting its way across his ribs. His face is swollen, but he still has the audacity to chuckle up at her.

"You don't mean that, Elsa," Jack says, stretching up a hand to play with a strand of her hair. She swats his hand away irritably.

Jack winces as he sits up, but then, as he twists this way and that, gauging the sensitivity of his wound, he deems it good enough, and he pulls her up as well.

"Let's go for a drive," Jack says, and when he looks down at her, eyes soft and lips quirking, Elsa finds that she can't say no.

When Jack sits at the wheel, he looks at the rearview mirror and something falls inside.

"What's wrong?" Elsa asks, frowning slightly. "What does your timer say?"

"Nothing," Jack says abruptly. His fingers rest lightly in his lap. He makes no move to turn on the engine.

Elsa doesn't question him, and ten seconds of silence passes before Jack finally twists the keys, and the car rumbles beneath them.

All that time, even as Jack pulls away from the curb, he looks at the rearview mirror every once in a while, face hard and rigid.

Twenty minutes later, when the lights turn green, a truck barrels past its red light, a bouncing can of wayward death, ten kilometres over the speed limit, and Elsa sees Jack release his breath.

"Was that truck going to hit us?" Elsa asks conversationally.

"Yeah, if we'd started driving ten seconds sooner, I'd imagine," Jack says, and they speak no more about it.

Jack drives like he lives; reckless and wild and thoughtlessly out of control. Elsa can almost _see _his life clock, numbers going haywire as each step of the pedal means another possibility of death, another two years taken off his life, one decision leading to another leading to another leading to his eventual demise.

It's sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, really. If Jack knows when he's going to die, if he knows which decisions will shorten his life, he can take steps to avoid it, or he could plunge headlong into the tunnel. Elsa supposes that's what has defined him from the moment he understood those glowing red numbers.

"I'll show you what they look like," Jack had said, eighteen years old and shoulders heavy with the burden of knowing something that humans, as a rule, should never, ever know.

He scribbled onto the floor of the abandoned dance studio with a permanent marker, barre dusty and mirrors flicked with white spots.

40:08:29:04:59:23

"Years, months, days, hours, minutes, seconds," Jack said, and he stared at those numbers blankly. "That's how much I have right now. Last year I used to have around sixty-one years. Then I started smoking, and with every cigarette, I started losing minutes, days, weeks, and now I'm left with this."

"Then you should quit smoking," Elsa snapped.

When Jack laughed, a little desperately, he said, "You wouldn't understand."

Others his age were filled with hopes and fears and dreams and goals. Jack was filled with nothing but a future of one long, continuous road, and at the very end stood a door that would lead to his death, whether it be in a week's time, or in five years' time, or even in one million years' time. And even now, a quarter of the way through and still alive, he can see nothing else but the end.

It starts to get dark when Jack turns into country road, dirt and gravel and mud. Elsa begins to worry; she has no idea where they are, nor if they even have enough petrol to get back.

"What are we doing here?" Elsa says, annoyance picking its way to the surface. "I have work tomorrow!"

"I know," Jack says, placating. He's parked the car in the middle of an open field, and there's nothing but endless sky above them. "Lie here," he pats the hood of the car, "and just… _watch_."

So it's tacky and unoriginal, but as Elsa fits herself perfectly into the crook of Jack's arm and watches the first stars burst softly into existence, she finds that perhaps she could live in this moment forever. And they lie there for hours, just staring up, up, up, and it's just so satisfyingly simple.

"We should go," Elsa mumbles, when it hits eleven o'clock, but then a pair of lips suddenly swallow her own, and Jack's kissing her and she's kissing back, and she then remembers how much she's missed this.

But then the euphoria goes as quickly as it comes, dissipates into the freezing air and towards the dazzling cosmos. Elsa knows what this is, and she doesn't want it.

"No," Elsa says quietly. Jack pulls away, eyes dark as he searches her face. "You're just going to leave again, and come back a week later covered in injuries and looking as if you'd just murdered someone. If we're going to start a relationship, you can't do this. You can't just leave me waiting like a girl pining after an unrequited love. I can't do this; I did it five years ago, and I'm not doing it again."

Jack shifts from her fully now, eyes lowered, and Elsa shivers when his warmth disappears.

They don't speak the entire ride back.

Jack is gone when she wakes up the next morning, and she isn't surprised. Jack has a habit of running away from things, and Elsa has no problems just going about her day as usual.

But then, perhaps even sadder, is that she's found the feeling of disappointment to be a familiar weight in her chest.

* * *

"Do you know what I think?" Rapunzel says through a mouthful of chicken sandwich. "I think you should just dump him and go after someone who treats you like a princess."

"We're not dating, Rapunzel," Elsa says plainly.

"Sure you are," Rapunzel says perplexedly. "You guys are fucking, right?"

Shrugging, Elsa just says, "It's a friends-with-benefits type of thing. Besides, I've been seeing other men. Jack doesn't care."

"You've been 'friends-with-benefits' since the second last year of highschool," Rapunzel says pointedly, raising a shaped brow. "And please, I'm not stupid, Elsa. Your definition of 'seeing other men' is just one-night stands."

Elsa tries to ignore Rapunzel, going as far as plugging in earphones, even though they're not allowed at work and she'd get onto her boss' bad side. But her words ring uncomfortably in Elsa's stomach, and as she heads home from work that day, and she finds herself questioning what she and Jack really are.

They're friends, surely. There were around three months when they were twenty, which were an exception, where they tried a committed relationship. Elsa hated it. The whole time, Jack gave off a vibe, as if he wanted to be somewhere else, as if he were needed somewhere else.

Jack is a ghost, a drifter. He has no anchor or ties to anything other than himself, always entering illegal underground fights as a form of income, vandalizing public property, hooking up at clubs and pulling the disappearing act the morning after. Elsa doesn't begrudge him for his lifestyle, because she supposes, in a way, she _does_ understand.

The term for Jack would probably be something like _tempting fate_. He dances around the edge, five seconds from death and still willing to take the punch.

Elsa went to one of his fights, for the first and last time. The man she saw was not Jack Frost, and yet he there he was, his face and his body, but too different for her to fully recognise. That Jack Frost was a monster with blood on his knuckles and death in his eyes. That Jack Frost sent his opponent into a coma. That Jack Frost broke four ribs and a leg, shattered a left cheekbone and all ten fingers, and even when the man was down, that Jack Frost bellowed like a wild animal, and the crowd bellowed back like starved wolves.

Elsa never wanted to see that again. She didn't even want to look at Jack, lest she sees something else reflected back in his eyes.

* * *

"Elsa!" Jack crows as he raids through her pantry. "Welcome home!"

"So this is the infamous Jack, eh?" Rapunzel comments, and she looks at him up and down unashamedly. "You didn't tell me he was this tall, Elsa."

"Oh," Jack says, blinking large, doe eyes. "You brought a friend home."

Elsa groans inwardly as she pushes Jack off into the living room.

"Why are you here?" Elsa grimaces, rounding towards him with her hands on her hips.

"How long has it been?" Jack answers instead, oblivious to Elsa's anger. "I got knocked out for a bit, woke up in a drain. I took a shower here. By the way, Elsa, could you please buy some new clothes for me? Like, a shirt and pants will do. The ones I have right now are gross. Please?"

Elsa almost slaps him. "For your information," Elsa says, breathing deeply. "You've been gone three weeks. I told you not to come back, Jack. This isn't–it's not–"

"Rapunzel is pretty," Jack says, taking a peek at her coworker. "Nice ass."

Throwing her hands in the air, Elsa just thumps Jack's chest and stalks away.

Rapunzel had wheedled her way into a free dinner after work, and Elsa was too distracted to say no until she realised what she had just said, and then it was too late to back out.

Rapunzel is too chatty for Elsa's liking, to be honest. The woman loved talking about Eugene, her fiancé, and how Elsa should "settle down and get married and have cute little Elsa clones". Elsa doesn't appreciate her input.

"You shouldn't waste your time, you know," Rapunzel admonishes, as if she is the wise woman of the world. "Before you know it, you'll be seventy and ugly, with twenty cats and an empty house."

"I doubt I'll even last that long," Elsa jokes back, and turns the heat down on the stove.

Jack ambles into the kitchen, ears pricked like a hound, a laugh bubbling in his throat.

"Nah, no way," Jack says, tasting the spaghetti sauce that Elsa's stirring. "Elsa will still be young and beautiful, always. She has a lot of time left."

"Then _you'll_ be seventy and ugly, with twenty cats and an empty house," Rapunzel shoots back.

"Yup," Jack says, grinning so widely it hurts.

Elsa quickly slams the plates down, so that everything isn't so suffocating anymore.

* * *

Jack gets drunk after Rapunzel leaves. The smell permeates the room, soaking it up like a sponge. They're huddled together on the couch, and it's dark because neither has bothered to get up for the lights.

The air is long, sharp needles, and the cup of hot chocolate burns her hands like fire. Sitting there, cocooned in a blanket of prickles and Jack half-awake next to her, Elsa feels loneliness coursing through her veins like ice, emptiness settling in between her ribs, her lungs made of tiny, blistering paper cuts.

And fear, like a disease, latching onto her cells, killing them slowly, rendering each organ impossible to regulate.

Elsa is dying, and it's not even a fast one. She is dying like many others her age are dying, gradually and quietly, wasting away at a desk job in the office, and someday she will date someone equally as unexciting, will marry a man whom she thinks, whom she hopes, she will love, and growing old will become a mediocre occupation, and her life will plateau into one long, worthless existence.

And Jack will just go on, chipping away at his life clock, testing his luck, testing his skills. Because he is Peter Pan, never growing up, never growing old. He will be young forever, because while his timer counts down, Jack will never lead an ordinary life; he will never find a wife and have kids. Jack is something other than normal, an endless blur of bloody teeth and chilling grins.

He will destroy himself, and Elsa isn't going to lift a finger.

"Sorry about that," Jack says suddenly, words slurred from liquor. His voice is a gunshot, and it destroys her musings. He sniggers. "I guess I scared you, didn't I? Seventy with a house and twenty cats. Heh, bullshit if I ever heard."

Elsa doesn't answer, just keeps her gaze on the animal documentary that's on television.

"I'm a pathological liar," Jack says, and there is a slight lilt in the creases of his voice. "I can't seem to tell the truth about anything."

"I know," Elsa says harshly. The words quiver. "I know; I've been with you for years. I _know_."

"That's good," Jack giggles, alcohol winding his brain up like mechanical soldier. "At least you understand me, Elsie."

"Don't call me that."

Grunting, Jack pushes himself up, and he smells like sweat and something sour. "Toothiana didn't get me at all. Didn't get why I fight, didn't get why I drive like I'm looking for a crash. Fuck, Elsie, I _tried_. I tried _so hard_ for her."

His breaths gasp through the apartment. Elsa doesn't look his way.

"Then why," Elsa says, "don't you try this hard for me?"

Then she meets his muddled gaze, and asks even softer, "Don't I deserve that much, at least?"

The way Jack crumples is enough for Elsa to look away again.

"You do," Jack finally sighs out, twisting his blanket in his grip. "You do. You deserve so much better than me. But I'm really selfish, Elsie. I need you. You keep me together; you always have, ever since highschool. Always, always, always, Elsie. It's always been you."

The glow from the television casts half his face into shadow, and while one side is flickering lights and despairing sorrow, the other side is just. Dark.

"Don't you get it, Elsa?" Jack asks, and his voice is raw and frail and broken, and Elsa's chest clenches torturously. "I'm going to die soon."

"You won't," Elsa says roughly. "You have ages, years. You have time, Jack."

Jack laughs. He's always laughing, but never before has it sounded so miserable, so desolately hollow.

"No, I don't, Elsa," Jack says, and he is so tired and so weary, a coffin of drying flesh and blackened lungs and a heart that's tallying down the pumps it has left.

"How much time?" Elsa asks. "Jack, how much time do you have left?"

But Jack's started to snore now.

* * *

"How much did I fucking drink?" Jack moans, clutching his head. He makes another whale-like sound. "Elsaaaa!"

"I'm not your maid," Elsa huffs. She hands him a glass of water and a tablet. "Shut up. No one told you to drink out my entire cabinet."

In the bright shine of day, it's easy to throw Jack's drunken ramblings out the window, write them off as nothing but stupidity in the form of words. But Elsa knows from experience that something said in the presence of alcohol is usually the truth, and truth is haunting in ways she can't shake off.

"Jack," she begins, but Jack is already stumbling to the door, jacket in hand and dragging his bag along the ground.

"Sorry, Elsa," Jack says, whining a little when the sun hits his face. "I got a job to do. I'll see you around. Thanks for the food."

And then he's gone, and again, like every time before that, Elsa doesn't even try to make him stay.

* * *

Once, Elsa asked him why he smoked.

They were twenty-one and jobless, just two lost souls sitting in an abandoned kids' playground.

Chortling, Jack had pulled a cigarette out from his pack, casually lighting it and blowing the resulting smoke into her face.

"I don't know," Jack said, rolling his neck. "I guess I just wanted to."

"Really?" Elsa asked. Jack seemed to consider this for a moment, but then he hummed under his breath.

"I want to commit suicide, but I'm too much of a coward to go and hang myself or jump off a bridge. So I smoke, and smoking is a form of suicide, isn't it?"

"Everything is a form of suicide, Jack. Smoking is just one of the faster ways."

"Yeah, I guess it is."

The swings creaked as they swung lightly, and then Jack leaned over and kissed Elsa a moment later, his lips scalding and hot, nicotine scorching her tongue.

Looking back, that wasn't probably the best answer to when a friend tells you that he desires death. Looking back, it was probably that conversation that triggered Jack into entering illegal fight tournaments. Jack says it wasn't her fault, that he would have found a way into that kind of lifestyle with or without her help. Elsa still beats herself up about it every night, when the world is muted at four o'clock in the morning, and her thoughts are loud like howling demons.

* * *

"So you and Rapunzel will be calculating the depreciation for all the assets purchased by the company so far this year. Mr North wants to see you at his office, Elsa, before you get off work. Rapunzel, Mr North has also told me to tell you that the coffee machine in the break room does not brew hot chocolate and that if you would like some hot chocolate and you're going to start bringing in chocolate powder, don't, because he will get fat, and there's nothing more important than health."

"Got it," Rapunzel says, scowling a little when their supervisor walks away. When he's out of sight, she immediately pounces on Elsa, whose cubicle is opposite hers, and complains, "But I hate coffee! Chocolate is life!"

"Get to work, Rapunzel," Elsa says absent-mindedly. But even as Rapunzel's grumblings fade away, she's tapping her pen lightly on her desk, and the Excel spreadsheet in front of her is just a glaring white screen. The clock on her desktop reads 10:34 a.m., and her eyelids are already beginning to close.

Jack hates chocolate. And Jack also says that when he was younger, he was almost in an accident. And it was on that day that he finally understood what the numbers hanging above his head were.

It started with a car.

Jack has seen twelve red numbers since as long as he can remember. He'd asked his mother what they were, asked his father and his friends and the rest of his family. No one could see it, and for a long time, his mother had cried thinking Jack was mentally unstable. Eventually, though, Jack just learned to keep his mouth shut, and everyone forget about it except him.

When Jack was eleven, he had been playing soccer with Bunnymund on the sidewalk, eating an Easter egg at the same time. The ball had bounced onto the road, and Jack, all thoughts of safety flying clean out of his mind, ran after it. Too late, he heard the shrieking bellows of a car careening around the bend.

72:01:28:07:56:33

He saw his timer change in the reflection of the car windscreen.

00:00:00:00:00:11

00:00:00:00:00:10

Right there, in the middle of the road with death screaming at him in the face, with melted chocolate bitter in his mouth, a horrified, numb sort of comprehension struck him. But even as he started to understand, a man, a stranger, a hero, raced onto the road and threw Jack out of the way.

71:01:28:07:52:04

The man had died in Jack's place. Something snapped inside of him that day. Long before anything else, long, long, long before Elsa met him, Jack was already broken, already missing something that Elsa, no matter how hard she's tried, has never been able to repair.

And she's tried. She's tried so fucking hard.

"No! I died!" Rapunzel cries, jerking Elsa out of her memories. Rapunzel shakes a fist at her computer, and when Elsa looks back, she sees a game of Tetris flashing in seizure-inducing colours, gleefully announcing GAME OVER, GAME OVER.

Game over.

* * *

"Hey, Elsa," Jack says quietly, when she opens her door at three o'clock in the morning.

"Hey, Jack," Elsa says calmly. She takes in his appearance, raising a critical brow. "Did you lose this fight?"

Jack limps in, his ankle bandaged up and spotting blood. His lips are inflamed, one eye dark purple. When he shrugs off his jacket, Elsa sees him wince; he's probably bruised some ribs.

"It's been nearly a month," Elsa says, making no move to help him. "Where have you been?"

"Fighting," Jack says simply, grinning at her. "It was great, Elsa. I got a few opponents who gave me a good challenge."

"You mean you met some opponents who are just as fucked up as you are," Elsa mutters under her breath.

Jack reaches up to take down her living room clock, wobbling slightly as he does. He pops out the batteries and leaves the clock face down on the table. It's frozen at 3:12.

"I've been around," Jack says, sensing her questions. "You know me. I just… do whatever."

"Testing your timer, you mean," Elsa says, finally shutting the door and pulling her dressing gown tighter around herself.

Jack flops onto the couch, and he lets out a relieved exhale. "Whatever you want to think, Elsa. But anyway, it's good to be back."

"Are you staying?" Elsa asks, even if she knows it's useless.

"Maybe," Jack says, and he half-smiles up at her. Elsa notices that there are new lines on his face, and that his one decent eye is more sunken than she remembers.

Jack takes a long time showering, nearly half an hour. In that time, Elsa fries an egg and toasts two slices of bread. When he comes out though, the egg is cold and the bread stale. But Jack still eats, exactly the same as before: quick, hurried, as if he doesn't have enough time to sit down and enjoy.

At four in the morning, a secret spills from Jack's mouth, almost unbidden. The odd lighting throws everything off balance, and Elsa struggles to catch Jack's murmurs as his voice scratches out from beneath two and a half decades of pain.

"You know," Jack says, "that I was almost in an accident when I was eleven, right? Well three weeks before I met you, second last year of highschool, someone saved my life."

"What happened?"

"I was going to jump off a building," Jack says. Something cold creeps up Elsa's spine. "My classmate. His nickname was Sandy. Sweet kid. I was going to jump–I jumped–he saw and he ran over and he grabbed me just as I stepped off. It was a shock. I reached for the bar just in time, but Sandy was pulled over the railing as well. He didn't make it."

Elsa remembers this. Remembers her school in an uproar. But the details were inaccurate, rumours and rumours and more rumours, and in the end nothing had been confirmed to the student public.

Jack snickers.

"Sandy was an idiot. I wanted to die." Jack's voice grows increasingly louder. "He died trying to save me. Top of the class. Wanted to be a neurosurgeon because his mother passed away from brain cancer. Fucking nicest person in this whole fucking city. Dead. Gone. Boom. Whoosh. Gone gone gone gone, like my time, like my life, _all gone_."

He stares at Elsa, chest heaving, and Elsa doesn't know what to do, doesn't know what to say to make this better. This is beyond her, beyond her control. And she wants to cry, wants to bawl and scream and shout, because Jack is her friend, Jack is her closest companion, Elsa loves Jack, he's falling apart in front of her, and she's sitting here like a bloodless statue.

"One, two," Jack nearly sobs, "dead in my place. How many other people have to die? Is this some stupid curse of the life clock? Some clichéd low budget movie storyline? My life is just this big, angsty joke. Three, four. Five, six. Maybe twenty, maybe fifty. Maybe everyone will just die around me. Maybe their life clocks are the ones with less time than me. Maybe me seeing my life clock is just false hope; I can die when I choose to die, but I won't die when I have the courage to die."

When Jack lifts his eyes to meet hers, words hoarse after his unhinged rant, Elsa finds her breath seizing, her lungs cementing like ice. There is something about the way he looks, disoriented and afraid and alone.

"So I have to confess to you, Elsie," Jack says, so soft she can barely hear him. "I lied to you. I'm a fucking liar, remember?"

A grin splits Jack's face, and it's so terrifying that Elsa finds herself standing up, backing away, her stool clattering to the ground. Jack laughs loudly, so loudly in the silence before dawn.

"I had decades left," Jack whispers, still beaming oddly at her, "before I met you. Second last year of highschool, looked at you properly for the first time. There was a window next to you. Saw my timer change. Then suddenly, less than ten left, whittling down to eight measly years. No matter what I did, no matter how many decisions I changed, my path stayed the same whenever you were part of my future. Eight years."

Her ears are buzzing.

"Then why," Elsa finally chokes out, "didn't you get away from me?"

"I was going to!" Jack roars, jumping to her feet. He's never gotten angry before, never directed his fury at her. Elsa cowers under his wrath, feels tears spring into her eyes. Five in the morning, the neighbours will wake with all this noise, but the world will go on while Elsa's own world is shattering. "I was _going _to! I was _supposed _to! But then…" he deflates without warning, breathless, "but then you just stood there, carrying all these textbooks, trying so hard, asking about _clocks_, of all things. And then I just… went along. Became friends. Then started meaningless sex. And then suddenly you were the most important person in my life, because you were _there _for me. Elsie, you were _there for me_. Always."

"Then… then how much time do you have left?" Elsa doesn't want to know. She doesn't want to know doesn't want to know doesn't want to–

"Seven days," Jack says, and he tries so hard to smile. When in doubt, smile. When sad, smile. When everything is going downhill and you know you're going to die, smile. "Seven days, six hours, six minutes, and six seconds. Five seconds. Four seconds. Three, two. One."

* * *

author's note:

so calculating the depreciation for all the assets purchased by the company is something i got off yahoo answers when i googled 'what do accountants do' and like if the context is bullshit i sincerely apologise i tried therefore no one should criticize me… haha no jks tell me if i'm wrong pls.

jack is basically living the _fight club _life ahahaha.

a nice fyi: this fic was originally supposed to be jack as a ballet dancer and elsa as a magazine photographer but i scrapped it because yeah.

the second part should be coming soon. soon. idk. i might be lying.


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